The Grouchy Grammarian: A How-Not-To Guide to the 47 Most Common Mistakes in English Made by Journalists, Broadcasters, and Others Who Should Know Better

193 Pages·2002·0.65 MB·English

by  Thomas Parrish

The Grouchy
Grammarian
™
A How-Not-To
Guide to the
47 Most Common
Mistakes in English
Made by Journalists,
Broadcasters, and
Others Who Should
Know Better
THOMAS PARRISH
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Copyright © 2002 by Thomas Parrish. All rights reserved
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey
Published simultaneously in Canada
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ISBN 0-471-22383-2
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
I’m not working in architecture, I’m working in architec-
ture as a language, and I think you have to have a grammar
in order to have a language. You can use it, you know, for
normal purposes, and you speak in prose. And if you are
good at that, you speak in wonderful prose. And if you are
really good, you can be a poet.
—LUDWIGMIESVANDERROHE, 1955
The English language is exquisite and a source of delight.
—JOYCECAROLOATES, 2001
Contents
The Grouch and I . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
The Topics
1 Think! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
2 Agreement; or, Where Did the Subject Go?. . . . 21
3 Special Kinds of Subjects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
4 A Bit More about Each . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
5 There—the Introducer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
6 FormerGreats . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
7 Just Because They Sound Alike . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
8 The ReasonIsn’t Because . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
9 Mayand Might:Did They or Didn’t They?. . . . . 49
10 As of Yet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
11 Floaters and Danglers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
12 A.M./Morning, P.M./Afternoon, Evening . . . . . . . 58
13 Would Havevs. Had. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
14 Apostrophe Atrocities. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
15 It’sa Contraction—Really. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
16 WhomCares?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
17 Whiches, Who’s, and Thats . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
18 Where’s the Irony? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
19 The Intrusive Of. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
20 Preposition Propositions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
21 But Won’t You Miss Me? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
22 Well, Better, Best, Most . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
v
vi CONTENTS
23 Between Whoand What?: Prepositions
with More Than One Object. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
24 Other. . . or Else . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
25 Lie, Lay . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
26 A Case of LeadPoisoning. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
27 Silly Tautologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
28 False Series . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
29 French Misses. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
30 None Is,None Are?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
31 DrugIs a Drag. It Must Have SnuckIn . . . . . . . . 112
32 And/Or. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
33 Overworked and Undereffective . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
34 Quantities, Numbers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
35 Watering What You’re Writing: The Alleged
Criminal and the AllegedCrime. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
36 OnlyBut Not Lonely . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
37 Pairs—Some Trickier Than Others. . . . . . . . . . . 126
38 Betweenvs. Among. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
39 Those Good Old Sayings. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134
40 Fuzz. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137
41 As . . . Than . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139
42 Not Appropriate. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
43 Sorry, You’ve Already Used That One. . . . . . . . . 146
44 From Classical Tongues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148
45 Like, Like. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154
46 Just the Facts, Ma’am . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158
47 Lost Causes? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163
The Grouch Reflects. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165
Afterword. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169
Using This Book . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171
Thanks. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173
From the Grouch’s Shelves—A Bibliography. . . . . . . . . . . 175
Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181
The Grouch and I
(cid:1) (cid:2)
i
It wasn’t any one thing that finally turned my old friend, the
grouchy grammarian, into a strident activist. For a long time he
had been minding his own business, he told me, with no desire
to get into any arguments with anybody. I didn’t completely
believe him, to tell you the truth. For all his talk about loving a
quiet life and trying to stay out of trouble, I knew he enjoyed a
good fight.
What happened, exactly?
I had stopped by to see him one morning in March. Though
he gave me as friendly a greeting as his nature permitted, his
voice was heavy with depression. I saw nothing unusual in that,
of course. Every time he picked up a newspaper or clicked on the
TV, he would see or hear some blunder that would start him
cursing reporters, editors, broadcasters, media executives, and,
more fundamentally, the schools and colleges that had produced
such bunglers. But today he seemed even more downcast—and
therefore grumpier—than usual.
I asked him what the trouble was.
In just a few weeks it would be April, the old grump snapped,
and he already dreaded its coming. Didn’t I realize that TV news-
casters, National Public Radio reporters, newspaper headline
1
2 THE GROUCHY GRAMMARIAN
writers, and other media types would soon be telling us all, with
infuriating repetitiveness, to set our clocks ahead on a certain
Saturday night because “daylight savings time” was arriving?
(When he chose to, he could speak in loud italics.) “SavingS
time,” he repeated, hissing the S. “There’s no such damned
thing, of course,” he said; “the expression makes no sense at all.
The correct term, daylight-saving time, describes a method of
conserving, or saving,daylight by changing the clock rather than
changing people’s habits.”
I knew that, and he knew I knew it, but we seemed to agree
that he shouldn’t risk a stroke through trying to repress his
feelings.
“The rise of savings here,” growled my gruff old friend, “is
probably the result of this word’s increasing use as a singular
rather than a plural noun. Look at advertisers—they’re the chief
perpetrators.” Riffling (not rifling) through his mail one day, it
seemed, he had felt particular irritation when he came across a
brochure with this message: “For only $19.95 (a $10 savings),
you can receive a full-grain leather Shirt Pocket Briefcase.” “It’s
only one saving!” he snarled. “Savings represents a plural idea,
standing for the results of many individual acts of saving. We
have a savings account, but buying something we need at a
reduced price represents a saving.”
As you can see, my friend not only had a snappish tempera-
ment, he had a strongly developed fondness for leaping into a
lecture from a standing start.
Other incidents followed the savings affair as winter moved
into spring. One evening, while the grouch and I were watching
a basketball tournament game, he recoiled in horror when an
otherwise competent basketball color commentator declared
after a player intercepted a pass and started downfloor that there
was “nobody between heand the basket.”
Not long afterward, he heard another color commentator,
THE GROUCH AND I 3
this one on baseball, offer the opinion that if a runner tagged out
at second base had slid, “he mayhave been safe.”
Spelling, too, concerned my friend. He plucked a clipping
from a stack of papers and waved it at me. When it stopped flut-
tering, I saw from the type that it had come from the New York
Times; the headline read “Profit Rises 10% at Phillip Morris.”
My friend also noted that another newspaper believes that the
Duke of Edinburgh’s first name is Phillipand that we once had a
march king named John Phillip Sousa (the latter a belief shared
at least once by the Times Magazine). “And the people at the
Museum of Modern Art,” he said with a kind of negative chor-
tle, “think they know a composer named P-h-i-l-l-i-p Glass.
They spelled it that way in one of the ads for that concert series
they have in the summer.”
When the grouchy grammarian heard an actor in a TV
drama describe a souvenir as “a nice momento,” he reacted with
deep disgust. “Those people must think that the word is a fancy
Spanish or perhaps Italian adaptation of moment,” he barked.
“But what in God’s name would the idea of moment have to do
with the idea of remembering? Actually, mementomerely comes
from the Latin verbmeminisse—to remember.”
I nodded, dutifully.
(cid:1) (cid:2)
ii
“All these blunders!” the grouch said to me one day. “They’re
getting to me, Parrish, really getting to me! Just killing me!
Where do they come from? Where in the hell do they come
from?”
“Well,” I said, “they may—”
“A general lack of information—that’s it, damn it! And what
an overall effect—anything but professionalism! Anything but
professionalism! What did these people study in high school